AMERICANIZING TURKEY 
 
 By the late William T. Stead 
 
 SALONICA WITH ITS "WHITE TOWER" 
 
THE FOI-LOWING ARTICLE BY MR. WM. T. 
 STEAD APPEARED IN THE COLUMNS OF THE 
 "youth's companion," and is REPRINTED for 
 THE THESSALONICA AGRICULTURAL AND IN- 
 DUSTRIAL SCHOOL OF SALONICA, MACEDONIA, 
 BY COURTESY OF THE " YOUTH'S COMPANION." 
 
A Note on the Thessalonica Agricultural and Industrial Institute 
 
 By Rev. John Henry House, D.D., Principal. 
 
 ''T^HIS article by the late William T. Stead, the man of the broad 
 -1- vision, with its message of hope and inspiration for a new- 
 Macedonia, comes to Americans with especial significance at this 
 time, when the results of the Balkan war, although still uncertain, must 
 inevitably open up larger opportunities for Americans to influence and 
 uplift the peoples of Macedonia. 
 
 The Thessalonica Agricultural Institute is now a little over eight 
 years old. It was begun without means but has gradually grown un- 
 til it has a building, which when packed, will hold fifty boys. Many 
 applicants are turned away because of the lack of accommodations. 
 We suppose it would be hard to find an institution with so small a 
 budget that does as much. The amount sent by the New York 
 treasurer last year was $5587.86, and any one who wishes to know 
 what was done with this budget in the various departments of agri- 
 
 1 
 
culture, silk-culture, carpentry, masonry, shoe-making and tailoring, 
 can have the report sent to him by addressing the Treasurer Wm. B. 
 Isham, Esq., 27 William St. New York. The main stress is laid upon 
 agriculture, and the accompanying two illustrations of grain fields 
 will show the differance between work done by scientific culture on 
 our fields, and unscientific on fields near by. The change from a 
 desert-looking waste to fruitful fields which the one picture presents, 
 shows what we are aiming at for the villages of Macedonia. The 
 building of our brick barn, illustrates what we attempt in the masonry 
 department, and the bright faces of our boys, showing their purpose 
 and ability to accomplish things, is we believe, a revelation of what 
 can be done for the rural life in Macedonia when we are equipped with 
 means for carrying on demonstration work in the villages. 
 
 2 
 
AMERICANIZING TURKEY 
 
 BY THE LATE WILLIAM T. STEAD 
 
 HOW often have I wished during my visits to Turl<ey that Christ- 
 ian ministers would let the Acts of the Apostles rest for awhile, 
 and instead tell their congregations something of the acts of the 
 modern apostles who are laboring to-day in the very countries that 
 enjoyed the ministry of Saint Paul ! liow much more interesting it 
 would be to hear the story of the founding of the American college at 
 Tarsus than to hear for the thousandth time of the Tarsus of Saul, 
 who found salvation on the way to Damascus ! And how much 
 more vivid and inspiring an account of the Thessalonica Agricultural 
 and Industrial Institute that the Americans have founded at Salonika 
 would be, than the threadbare dissertations on the man of Macedonia, 
 the sight of whom in a dream brought the missionary to the Gentiles 
 nearly nineteen centuries ago to the city where Abdul- Hamid in his 
 prison villa so long waited deliverance by death ! 
 
AxMERICAN INDIFFERENCE 
 
 THE general apathy and indifference of the average educated 
 American in Europe to the one supremely great and useful 
 achievement of Americans in the Old World is to me almost incon- 
 ceivable. Of course there are a select few who know what is being 
 done, for otherwise the work would cease. But of the Americans 
 I have met, I think that not one in a hundred has any realizing sense, 
 of the immense value of the wolk that is being done by their country- 
 men and countrywomen in European and Asiatic Turkey. I am 
 not writing from the missionary point of view. I am writing as a man 
 interested in the civilization, the education, the general uplifting of 
 his fellow men. And I unhesitatingly affirm that when I get sick and 
 weary over the contemplation of the mean intrigues, the squalid am- 
 bitions and the unscrupulous doings of politicians, I find an unfailing- 
 refreshment for my soul in remembering the heroic pioneer work that 
 is being done in' the dominions of the Sultan by citizens of the United 
 States. 
 
 4 
 
Great Britain, absorbed in diplomatic, naval and military affairs, 
 has spent untold millions of dollars in propping up the political system 
 established in the East. But to-day you look in vain for any lasting- 
 trace of good resulting from all her sacrifices. The American govern- 
 ment, on the other hand, has spent nothing, and has accomplished noth- 
 ing. But private American citizens, subscribing out of their own 
 pockets sums that in fifty years might have equaled the amo.unt spent 
 to build one modern ironclad, have left in every province of the Otto- 
 man Empire the imprint of their intelligence and of their character. 
 Sir Edwin Pears, in his book on Turkey and its people, says : 
 
 "In a journey made a few years ago through the entire length of 
 Roumelia from the west to the Black Sea, I found in almost every 
 town that the houses with the conveniences of European civilization, 
 with decent sanitary appliances and the comparative refinements to 
 be found in P^nglish homes of the lower middle class, were those of 
 former pupils of American schools. " 
 
 5 
 
That is a small thing, although if cleanliness is next to godliness, 
 it is not to be scoffed at ; but it is not a small thing to have laid the 
 foundation of a new state, to have given shape to the latest aspira- 
 tions of a nationality — and that is what the Americans did when they 
 cradled the Bulgarian kingdom in the classrooms of Robert College. 
 Even greater work than this they have done and are doing. If it is a great 
 thing to emancipate a nationality, how much greater a thing is it to lib- 
 erate a sex. The deliverance of Turkish womanhood from the darkness 
 of ignorance and seclusion is a task far more vast than "the foundation 
 of Bulgarian independence. The work is yet in its infancy ; but it has 
 been well begun, and the doing of it is perhaps one of the most im- 
 portant things that Americans are achieving in this world to-day. 
 
 On what trifles seemingly as light as air do the destinies of nations 
 hang! Between fifty and sixty years ago the Eastern world was convulsed 
 with war. Six nations sent their sons to fight and die in the Crimea 
 in order to secure forever the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. 
 
 6 
 
While they were thus engaged, attracting the attention of the world 
 by their alarums of war, it so happened that one fine day an American 
 citizen named Robert saw a boat cross the Bosporus to Scutari laden 
 with loaves of bread that seemed to have been baked in an American 
 oven. 
 
 Attracted by the homelike appearance of the loaves, he inquired 
 whence they came. He was told that Mr. Hamlin, an American Mis- 
 sionary who kept a school at a village called Bebek, had a contract to 
 supply Florence Nightingale's hospital with bread, and that these 
 loaves were baked by his pupils after the American fashion. 
 
 THE pastor's loaves 
 
 1])0BERT, an American Scot from New York, sought out this pas- 
 Ai tor who . was combining the supply of the bread of earth with that 
 of the bread of heaven, liked him, and fired by his zeal and enthusiasm, 
 gave him thirty thousand dollars with which to found an American 
 college in Turkey. . 
 
 7 
 
It was only a trifling sum ; but it has produced and is producing 
 more wide-reaching and permanent results than the thousand million 
 dollars that the European nations were then lavishing on their armies 
 in the Crimea. For that small endowment was like the grain of mus- 
 tard-seed in the parable. In the college thus founded were reared and 
 trained on American principles the men who twenty years afterward 
 destroyed the integrity of the great Ottoman Empire by founding the 
 principality, now the kingdom of Bulgaria, which is to-day the most 
 thriving, the most advanced, and the most powerful of all the Balkan 
 States. 
 
 There are not so many Bulgarian students in Robert College 
 now. The men trained there have founded schools and colleges in 
 their own country. Out of a total revenue of thirty-five million dol- 
 lars, Bulgaria spends on education every year four million dollars— 
 not a bad return for the thirty thousand dollars of American money 
 given by Christopher Robert in 1856. 
 
 8 
 
OUK NEIGIIBOU's BAKI.KV FIKI.U, ACROSS THli ROAD I'ROAt OURS 
 
OUR MODEL BARLF.V FIELD 
 
THE NEW BARN COMPLETED 
 
When the Russian soldiers returned home after the war of 1878 
 that hberted Bulgaria, each transport as it passed the bluff crowned by 
 the buildings of Robert College saluted the institution without which 
 all their heroic valor would have been of no avail. It was a well de- 
 served tribute to one of the most useful institutions on the broad 
 earth's surface. But how few American citizens have even so much 
 as heard its name ! ' 
 
 Robert College is, however, less interesting than the Ammerry- 
 colly Kuzearan, or American College for girls^ — formerly situated at 
 Scutari, but now being installed at Arnaut-Koi, a magnificent site im- 
 mediately behind Robert College. There, halls bearing the familiar 
 names of Gould, Woods and Rockefeller will accommodate the girl 
 undergraduates of the Ottoman Empire. Miss Patrick, the principal 
 of the American College for girls, is a woman of remarkable capacity, 
 both as a business administrator and as a teacher. She has for years 
 been doing work of inestimable value among the vvomen of the East. 
 
 9 
 
HALIDEII HANUM 
 
 '^I^HE college began as a high school in 1871, but was chartered as a 
 JL college in 1890 by the Massachusetts Legislature. At first, with 
 a few exceptions, it educated Christian girls only, one of whom was 
 the charming and accomplished Halideh Saleh, usually known as 
 Halideh Hanuai, or Mrs. Halideh, who entered the college in 1894 
 and was graduated in 1901. After the revolution, Turkish women 
 . were free to avail themselves of the college. But the college cannot 
 accommodate more than one hundred and ninety boarders, and most of 
 the applicants have to wait until the new building is ready, when the 
 number of students will be raised to four hundred and thirty. 
 
 The girls of Scutari come from all parts of the Ottoman Empire, 
 and are of all races and religions and languages. They all learn Eng- 
 lish and acquire American ideas. No one can estimate the influence 
 that these educated girls will exercise in Europe and Asia. 
 
 The Scutari College has not only done good training hundreds of 
 
 10 
 
girls ; it has set an example that the Turks are now eagerly imitating. 
 The Sultan gave Ahmed Riza, the chairman of the Chamber of De- 
 puties, a palace. He has given it to his sister to be used as a school 
 for Turkish girls. 
 
 When I was in Constantinople I wrote articles for the Tanin — 
 the Times of Turkey. They were translated into Turkish by Halideh 
 Hanum, who has long been a member of the staff of the paper. Hali- 
 deh Hanum also addressed a meeting at the college, at which I was 
 present. She is a very pretty woman, slight in figure; she spoke 
 with ease and effect before a mixed audience of men and women. 
 Yet she cannot go out in the streets without .a veil ; and when in the 
 innocence of my heart I proposed to ask the translator of my articles 
 to lunch with me at the leading hotel in Pera, I was told that no Turk- 
 ish woman would ever dream of going to a hotel even in the company 
 of her own husband. 
 
 I have made special mention of Robert College and the wc men's 
 college because I have visited both more than once. They are at the 
 
 ri 
 
center of the empire and stand at the head of their class. But they 
 are only the best types of many other similiar institutions that are 
 diffusing culture throughout the length and breadth of the Ottcman 
 Empire.: The Americans brought the first printing-press into Tui key. 
 An American first compiled a grammar for the Albanians. The 
 American Bible Society and the American Board of Foreign Missions 
 have for half a century developed the mind and trained the conscience 
 of tribes whose very names are unknown in the United States. It is 
 an inspiring sight merely to look at the map of the Ottoman Empire 
 that shows the stations of the American missions. The whole map is 
 dotted with red spots, and every one of these red spots is as a pharos 
 of intelligence, a lighthouse from whose lofty tower rays of culture 
 stream into the darkest regions of the earth. 
 
 In Asia Minor alone there are now four hundred and fifty schools 
 founded by Americans, on American principles and controlled by 
 American managers. In these schools there are to-day nearly twenty- 
 five thousand students, six thousand of whom are in the five colleges 
 
in which American professors are training- men and women to face 
 and solve the problems of the world in the true American spirit. It 
 is not too much to say that the only infusion of the ideas of 
 Western civilization into these Eastern races has come not from 
 Great Britain or Germany, but from America. 
 
 The American colleges are all religious institutions, but no at- 
 tempt is made to proselytize; and as W. E. Curtis said in his interest- 
 ing book, "Around the Black Sea," representatives of fifteen races 
 and five religions regularly attend service at Robert College. The 
 Jewish and Moslem students are often among the most punctual in 
 their attendance at these Christian prayers. 
 
 An illuminating little anecdote illustrates the influence of Ameri-- 
 can thought upon the Eastern mind. When I was a boy, Jacob Ab- 
 bot's books were among the treasures of our library. Nowadays I do 
 not know any one who reads, " Beechnut," " Stuyvesant," and the 
 other stories of my boyhood. Indeed I had myself almost forgotten 
 Jacob Abbot's name when suddenly I was startled by hearing from 
 
 13 
 
Sir W. Ramsay that my friend Halideh Planum had translated Jacob 
 Abbot's book, "The Mother in the home, " into Turkish for the in- 
 struction of Turkish mothers. Still more startHng, Halideh Hanum 
 was actually decorated by the ex-Sultan, Abdul Hamid, for her servi- 
 ces to the women of his empire in translating Abbot's book. 
 
 A wide field for prophetic speculation is opened by the thought 
 of American influence on these Eastern minds. Robert College 
 graduates made Bulgaria possible. American mission schools have 
 played a great part in the national awakening among the Armenians. 
 If there had only been more American schools in Albania and Macedo- 
 nia, the solution of the most difficult problem in the East of Europe 
 would not appear so hopeless as it is to-day. 
 
 14 
 
ONK OF OUR ML'I.liliKRV GROVES, WITH MAIN IIUILDING HEYOND